James F. Lawrence: GNV4ALL recommendations coming but work remains

Friday

Mar 10, 2017 at 2:00 PM

As promised, just four months after formally launching Gainesville for All, we’re ready to report back to the community.

With the exception of the two weeks around the Christmas holiday season, a diverse and inclusive group of citizens committed to finding systemic solutions to the region’s persistent racial and poverty-linked inequities met weekly since Nov. 4 and wrapped up deliberations two weeks ago. These area residents, who at some work sessions numbered more than 100, demonstrated that quality work can be completed in a relatively short turnaround period.

Their final recommendations for change, some of which are already being implemented, will be made public next Thursday, March 16, at the Thelma Boltin Center starting at 11 a.m. We’ve planned a short presentation from GNV4ALL teams that focused on education, criminal justice, health, jobs and families, and housing and transportation. We’ll also highlight those recommendations that are already moving forward.

While there are more than 20 total recommendations, we chose six as our top priorities based on the overall impact they’d have on getting to the root of Gainesville’s racial and socioeconomic problems, particularly on the east side where heavy concentrations of poor and black people live.

We’ll push hard for swift implementation of all of the recommendations. But tough choices had to be made to help ensure that the work of so many doesn’t get lost in the shuffle or end up gathering dust on a shelf.

Among the second-tier proposals, there was a loud and clear call for implicit bias training for teachers and employees in the criminal justice system. No one should think for a second that this recommendation isn’t of paramount importance too. In fact, we’ve begun discussions with University of Florida experts to help the Gainesville community confront subconscious biases that we all have developed over the course of our lives.

Each of our teams went the distance, often doing research between meetings and holding sub-group gatherings to discuss data and independent findings.

Take our education team, whose members comprised the largest single GNV4ALL team. They crafted solid solutions that focused on the racial disparities and achievement gaps between African American and white students in Alachua County Public Schools. These volunteers dug deep through data bases and voluminous studies. Unquestionably, that’s genuine commitment to rectifying a situation that isn’t improving fast enough.

It’s long been established that there is a direct correlation between poverty and academic achievement. An essay in American Psychologist magazine last fall put it this way: “Bottom line, the very experience of being black or brown in America — particularly for those living at or near the poverty line — is stressing kids beyond their abilities to cope.” The authors concluded that this predicament holds the key to eliminating the disparities in academic achievement. It’s why so many of our priority recommendations are linked to issues of poverty while also focusing on eradicating conscious and subconscious racism and bigotry.

On health matters, our recommendations represent the work of health professionals who have been working diligently the past several years to improve community health outcomes in Alachua County. Rather than duplicate their work, we asked the Alachua Safety Net Collaborative and Alachua Healthy Communities, which together represent dozens of agencies, to give us their top five recommendations for inclusion in our final report.

All team recommendations will be published next Sunday, March 19, in The Sun’s Issues section. Team leaders will provide insight into the makings of each proposal.

Now it’s your turn to go to work. If Gainesville is to truly become a premier city, it must pay much more attention to strengthening its weakest links. Get behind our initiatives. Urge your elected officials, employers, friends and neighbors to support them too.

Let’s do this!

— James F. Lawrence is director of GNV4ALL.

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